Why Lal Krishna Advani is right on Karnataka

Lal Krishna Advani has a lot to answer for. The senior BJP leader has appeared increasingly at odds with his earlier role as the man who contributed perhaps the most to build the party. He has come to inspire less and less confidence ever since he began positioning himself as a prime ministerial candidate, after illness forced Atal Bihari Vajpayee out of the reckoning. But none of that should detract from his consistent criticism of the BJP's handling of its affairs in Karnataka.

Advani's essential argument that the principal opposition at the Centre should strive to be, and be seen as, a principled party across the country, is a no-brainer. It is an idea that the BJP can ignore only at its peril.

Consider the claims of his critics, who are said to form the overwhelming majority in the BJP's parliamentary board. They have reportedly concluded that the party lost the recent assembly polls in the state mainly because the BJP's central leadership, acting on Advani's advice, forced the tainted former chief minister and powerful Lingayat leader BS Yeddyurappa to walk out and prop up a rival outfit. The BJP would have won 77 seats if the BJP and Yeddyurappa's KJP had fought the polls as a single force, they say. Further, they assert, the party would have won 94 seats and the Congress just 88 if the BJP's former member, B Sriramulu, had not formed his own BSR Congress either. However, this claim rests on the unwarranted assumption that the BJP would have won the 40 seats that it has in these polls even if it had not acted against Yeddyurappa after he was indicted by the Lokayukta in a report on illegal mining.

Such attempts to reduce political morality to elementary arithmetic in the garb of electoral strategy expose the myopia that afflicts decision-making in the country's second largest party.

Advani may have his own reasons for choosing to intermittently lash out at his party publicly, but his stand on Yeddyurappa as well as the former party president Nitin Gadkari does resonate with a large section of the electorate. The BJP ceded some of the political space against the corruption-scarred Congress government at the Centre to activists such as Anna Hazare and Arvind Kejriwal precisely because it refused to clean up the mess within for far too long. The party's analysis of its debacle in Karnataka also appears jarring because it is reportedly preparing to project Gujarat chief minister Narendra Modi as its prime ministerial candidate, partly because it recognises the public anger at corruption and hopes to gain from his image in this respect.

The BJP has much to lose by appearing opportunistic, just as it did by dilly-dallying, on the issue of corruption in the run-up to the general elections.